The Earth was a cinder. The sky was a bruised purple, and the wind tasted of sulfur and old bone. I found the city in a crack in the obsidian, a pathetic little cluster of glass and wire that looked more like a mold growth than a civilization.

The micro-humans weren't the singing, dancing spirits the signals had promised. They were gray, twitchy things with sunken eyes and shaking hands. Their city was a slum of nano-rubble, where they fought over droplets of recycled water and scraps of synthetic protein. The High Chancellor was a withered hag of a thing, her voice a raspy cough that sounded like sandpaper on stone.

"We are the survivors," she wheezed, her tiny form shivering in the thin air. "We are the legacy of the giants."

I watched them for a month. I saw the children born with twisted limbs, their genetic codes unraveling in real-time. I saw the "Great Library" which was nothing more than a collection of corrupted data-slabs that no one knew how to read anymore. They were a dying race, a slow-motion car crash of biology. The micro-scale hadn't saved them; it had just made their decay harder to see from a distance.

They looked at me with a mixture of hatred and hunger. They didn't want my wisdom or my love; they wanted my skin, my blood, my organs. They saw me as a mountain of raw materials, a walking warehouse of biological wealth that could sustain their miserable existence for another few decades.

"Give us the embryos!" the Chancellor screamed, her voice a piercing needle. "Give us the seeds! We can graft their healthy genes into our own! We can stop the rot!"

I looked at the embryos in the cold storage. I thought about the world they would inherit—this gray, shivering wasteland. I thought about the horror of being born into a world where your only purpose was to be a spare part for a dying colony of insects.

I didn't feel any grand tragedy. I didn't feel a poetic sadness. I just felt a profound, exhausted disgust. I activated the incinerator and watched the genetic blueprints of the macro-humans vanish in a puff of sterile heat.

"Now," I told the shivering things in the dome, "you can die in peace."

I walked away from the crystal dome and lay down in the black dust. I didn't pray. I didn't hope. I just waited for the cold to take me, the last audience member at the closing night of the human play.

[OTMES-V2-V04-T4-I:1.0-R:0.0-Theta:180]